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I believe all the many remedies expressed on cable TV about how to stop mass murder by gun in the U.S. are wrong. For example, one “expert” interviewed numerous times by MSNBC talks about how he wants to stop the violence by such means as universal background checks, or by limiting access to assault weapons. Then he interjects that he is a gun owner himself: he owns three shotguns and two rifles, and that he uses them responsibly for hunting. How can he not think that he is part of the problem? He needs five weapons? He doesn’t have five arms, but he has five firearms. That’s only the long guns he owns. No telling how many sidearms he owns.
I hear repeatedly from online commentators that gun owners should not worry, nobody is coming to take away their guns. Really? What is the purpose of having more guns than people in the U.S.? I am 82 years old. When I was a child WWII was in full tilt. Yet to my knowledge, no one thought that everyone in the country should have a military weapon.
Many gun owners say that they use their weapons only for hunting. They claim that it is a good way to control animal populations. That’s B.S. With some exceptions, hunters of large animals hunt for the thrill of the kill.
In the sixties I lived with my now-deceased first wife in New Jersey. A friend of that wife came to visit us with her husband. He was a policeman in Newark. He brought his sidearm into my house. I told him to take it out to his car and leave it there. He claimed that he was required by law to be armed, but I insisted. I asked what he did in Newark. He said that his favorite activity was to harass “niggers.” He never came to my house again.
For all the “responsible” gun owners, how many carry guns for nefarious purposes? We can’t know, but they can’t exercise gun inspired malevolence without possessing the guns. As many as possible of the extant guns in our country should be collected and melted into slag. Strict limits should be placed on gun manufacturers controlling how many of these weapons of war may be manufactured. Weapons of war! If they are weapons of war then no civilian should be allowed to possess these abominations.
It is quite possible for the Second Amendment to be repealed and replaced with something that makes sense. Amendments have been nullified before. That’s why we can buy alcoholic beverages.
I know that my pleadings will go nowhere. Americans are addicted to violence. Even TV commercials are likely to be violent. Cable TV abounds with violent programs. Ozzie and Harriet are reviled or ridiculed. Detective series are uniformly violent. And usually, gory. The most popular sports are the most violent. And on and on.
Personally, I contribute as much as I can to organizations dedicated to stopping violence to both humans and animals. As Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit priest, said at the Ploughshares trial: “We are not allowed to kill innocent people.”
Recently, I have been submitting posts showing progress on the writing of my MS about a metaphorical Windigo and the state of the world today. I am pleased to relate that the MS has been published on Amazon as a Kindle eBook. The date of publication was October 12, 2021, Indigenous People’s Day. Indigenous Peoples and settler-colonialists, including members of my historical family both play major parts in my exposition of the role capitalism is playing in the possible decline of what we call civilization.
Please go to amazon.com and search books for the title American Windigo. I hope many will find the book compelling. Thanks. If you are so moved, a positive review would be much appreciated.
Some of my ancestors were active participants in the invasion of what is now called “New England.” In my manuscript I relate a portion of the story of how they confiscated the land of New England in Massachusetts and Connecticut. They founded Springfield, Massachusetts and several other towns, of course without asking permission from the Native Americans already living there. They also participated in wars of near extinction of several of the Native tribes. The most destructive agents of annihilation were European diseases unknown to the Indians. These diseases preceded the settler-colonialists by diffusion, but in some extreme cases the settler-colonialists deliberately infected the biologically naïve Native peoples. They most emphatically did not consider themselves to be settler-colonialists, which they most emphatically were.
The paternal side of my family was from New England. The maternal link, the Reid family, is from Canada (Upper Canada, now Ontario) after immigration from England and Ireland, and the two sides of the family eventually converged on Ohio. They were invasive settler-colonialists there, too. Wherever my family moved across what was eventually called North America they were usurpers, directly and indirectly laying waste to the Indigenous Peoples they encountered. Willy-nilly they did this through the mechanism of capitalism. I will continue with this narrative in the next blog post.
For the last couple of years I have been working on a manuscript centered initially on the movements of my family starting in the seventeenth century. This was not merely an exercise. I wanted to show how members of my family were involved in the expropriation of land occupied by various Indigenous Americans in furtherance of the global imperial ambitions of Europeans. This land expropriation and virtual extermination of many thousands of Indians was a critical part of the development of today’s “culture” of control of the world by whites for the creation of capital. At present, the manuscript exceeds 400 pages. In this and the following blog posts I intend to present the essence of the manuscript in abbreviated form.
Members of my paternal family were so-called “pioneers” in the creation of the United States and Canada. Regrettably, this means that they were participants in the seizure of North America from the peoples who were there when the whites first arrived. Whether they were aware of their participation is a matter of conjecture. This movement across the continent serves as a vehicle for expatiation of a much broader subject, viz. the fate of the earth, and of all the creatures living there. I use a mythical metaphorical character originating from various Indian sources, known variously as the Windigo, Wetiko, and other names. I know this sounds impossibly ambitious, but I will try to explain my position more fully in posts still to come.
The first of my ancestors to come to the “New World” arrived in Rocksbury (now Roxbury) as a charter member of The Massachusetts Bay Company in 1630. He was part of the invasion of the continent by European whites. It was in fact an invasion, one part of an imperialist endeavor, mostly by French, Spanish, and especially British interests. Most whites of today will count this immigration to what is now called New England as a good thing. I’ll take a look at this idea in the next post.
We have all been subjected to a trial of the will in the last few months. The Covid-19 disease is far from the worst that has ever assailed mankind. The Black Plague took half of the population of China and one third of the population of Europe in the fourteenth century. Yet with our vastly more efficient communication abilities we are nearly infinitely more aware than the people of the fourteenth century. We will learn the “habits” of this coronavirus; we will learn how to combat it; we will find a vaccine or some other way to obviate the terrible punishment the disease has visited upon us.
That said, while fully acknowledging the brutal toll Covid-19 is exacting, and in no way trying to minimize the disastrous nature of this twenty-first century pandemic, I would like to offer a few thoughts about some social and economic lessons we could learn from the experience.
The Earth is facing an imminent calamity more lasting and more serious than the attack of the virus, if one can imagine such a thing. That calamity emanates from the Technological Revolution and the resulting capitalism leading to the ruination of the environment, and the depletion of the “resources” we think we cannot live without. If permitted to continue to flourish, this mode of living will without doubt lead to making the planet unlivable to humans, and perhaps to most other living things as well. The scourge of the coronavirus provides us some clear object lessons as to how we might escape this dilemma. I present a few ideas of the nature of some of those lessons.
Thanks to the pandemic, the number of vehicles on the roads has been drastically reduced. This means a lot less carbon emissions into the atmosphere, which means cleaner, healthier air. As the pandemic has progressed, the number of vehicles on the roads has increased concurrently. But at least for a while, the air was much clearer. Satellite photos of Beijing were actually of Beijing, rather than of a smoggy cloud of some of the worst air on the planet. I visited Beijing in 1980, and even then the air was almost unbreathable. This was the first time in decades Beijing air was clear of smog. Having a persistent pandemic of a contagious, lethal virus is no way to clear the air. But it does show that air pollution can be reduced enough to make breathable air.
We all know that many of the waters of the world are polluted, and more often than not one cannot see more than a few centimeters below the surface. During this pandemic, imagine the astonishment of many television news viewers to see a video of a large jellyfish swimming regally through the clear waters of a Venice canal. Italy was one of the nations hit hardest by Covid-19, yet in just a couple of months, this canal had been cleared of mud, sewage, and other pollutants.
We also know that the coronavirus pandemic will eventually come to a close. The great pandemic known as the Spanish Flu that occurred at the end of World War I took millions of victims. Horse-drawn carts went about in European cities collecting bodies, and dumping them in mass graves. Suicides were common, and many thought the end of the world, Armageddon, was at hand. October of 1918 was the worst, yet by the Armistice in November, the epidemic had for the most part disappeared. Amazingly, in short order, the ghastly disease was forgotten, unlike the War to End All War, which is still remembered vividly. We don’t know how the current pandemic will end. Perhaps the virus will sort of fade away. More likely it will become endemic, returning every year less intensely than at present.
So, what are some of the lessons to be learned from the experience of suffering through Covid-19? I can only deal with one or two of the phenomena revealed by the viral onslaught. I do not bring these to the fore because I want to trivialize the pandemic or, even worse, try to assert that it is beneficial. No, clearly the pandemic is an unmitigated disaster for humanity, and for that matter, for many other species as well. Think, for example, of the hordes of hogs that may have to be slaughtered with no way to process them into edible pork. Let’s all pray to whatever we believe in that this virus and others like it can be brought under control.
Yet we have seen some physical phenomena resulting from the situation that would be desirable if they could be brought to bear without having thousands dying from a terrible epidemic. I cannot offer a path to achieving this, but observations show us that things we might have thought virtually impossible are quite feasible, if only we can figure out a path. First, we have seen how the air can be rapidly cleared to give us healthier lives. Also, we have seen how once polluted waters can be made clear and clean. The big question is how to get it done. The only thing I can offer here is an opinion that to reach these goals requires a fundamental structural change in how our society operates globally. That opinion contains a belief that capitalism must go. It is predicated on the proposition that we must have more, more, more to survive. I’m not sure how we can get around that, but we must develop the attitude that enough is plenty.
First Thoughts:
From “Hard Times Come Again no More”
by Stephen Foster:
Let us pause in life’s pleasures and count its many tears,
While we all sup sorrow with the poor;
There’s a song that will linger forever in our ears;
Oh! Hard times come again no more.
When Clinton was giving her concession speech Wednesday afternoon, traders on the Stock Exchange booed and shouted out “lock her up.” So much for comity.
Many are making a big deal out of the fact that Hillary won the popular vote. Although true, it is not meaningful in the way many seek to present it.
Some things are more meaningful, however. First, let me assert from the outset that whoever tries to analyze what has and will happen is guessing. At this point no one knows what the future holds, least of all Donald Trump. In a sense of course this is always true no matter what. The future is just that, the future. It has not yet occurred. Let me nevertheless offer my opinion, realizing that it is nothing more than that. Opportunity enough later in this document to write what I would like or prefer to happen.
So here goes. Donald Trump made many declarations in the course of this election campaign, to say nothing of through the years, that are reprehensible to “progressives” and to many others. His entourage is already trying to make light of those assertions, and he, his campaign team, the media, traditional republicans, and those who until recently said “never Trump” are working to “normalize,” to use an unfortunate word, Trump and his administration in waiting. One can venture a guess from this that many of those reprehensible views will soon become conventional and acceptable.
A large portion of those who voted for Trump declared that they were looking for change; they do not trust the status quo. It is their expectation that fundamental change will in fact occur. I suggest that such either not hold their breath or to be careful what they wish for. Although Trump was elected as an agent of change, the composition of the Congress has changed but little. For the most part, incumbents were reelected, both Democratic and Republican and one might expect the power structure to change but little as well, with one monumental exception.
The power structure has changed in one particularly distressing way: the Executive branch is now in the hands of an authoritarian, racist, misogynist, xenophobic, bigoted sexual predator. How tragic that America’s first black President will be succeeded by such a man! This means that Republicans, who can be expected to join with Trump post-haste, will now be able to reverse the long, slow march to improve the lives of all. I emphatically do not mean to imply that Democrats through the years have had the best interests of the public in mind. Democrats are as venal as Republicans. In general, politicians who cannot be corrupted in some way are scarce as hen’s teeth. But even if one leaves out the outrageous acts Trump has said he intends to commit, Establishment Republicans have their eyes on a long list of reactionary programs. For example, while Trump has said he will roll back the Affordable Care Act, Paul Ryan wants to go far beyond that. He wants to privatize Medicare, one of the most popular government programs. Medicare is far from perfect. To my mind the Federal government should provide medical care for everyone. This is, contrary to the babble of reactionaries, not free medical care. It simply means that medical care costs would be paid out of general funds, rather than the fee-for-service care that puts good medical care out of the reach of so many.
Republicans will rally around Trump because their political careers are more important to them than the fate of the Earth, and truth be told, they are “True Believers” and will join Trump enthusiastically, not reluctantly. Virtually all Republicans, for example, truly believe that cutting taxes for the already rich will create jobs, despite decades of evidence to the contrary. Of course, they also think it will fatten their wallets. They simply do not accept the obvious, that capitalism leads to monopoly, which effectively leads to an authoritarian regime. Once the government is explicitly authoritarian, overcoming it becomes far more difficult, although still not impossible.
With all the hand wringing by Democrats, once Trump is President, said Democrats will rush to curry favor from him, with precious few exceptions. Yet now, in the first few days after the election, there are demonstrations in many major cities around the country.
Here is the energy plan just released on Saturday November 12 by the Trump transition team. This is the face of what’s ahead. If implemented, this will take us back a half-century of more:
Rather than continuing the current path to undermine and block America’s fossil fuel producers, the Trump Administration will encourage the production of these resources by opening onshore and offshore leasing on federal lands and waters. We will streamline the permitting process for all energy projects, including the billions of dollars in projects held up by President Obama, and rescind the job-destroying executive actions under his Administration. We will end the war on coal, and rescind the coal mining lease moratorium, the excessive Interior Department stream rule, and conduct a top-down review of all anti-coal regulations issued by the Obama Administration. We will eliminate the highly invasive “Waters of the US” rule, and scrap the $5 trillion dollar Obama-Clinton Climate Action Plan and the Clean Power Plan and prevent these unilateral plans from increasing monthly electric bills by double-digits without any measurable effect on Earth’s climate.
It is without a doubt a difficult time for those living in places such as rural West Virginia, a very conservative state. Senator Manchin, a Democrat who is up for reelection in 2018, can be counted upon to back any plan to reinvigorate the coal industry, and this should be no surprise. Politicians work hard to get reelected, not to do the right thing. Those living in West Virginia suffering from the gradual demise of the coal industry are interested in feeding their kids and paying the rent. Still, the rest of the world, including China, is working to reduce the use of coal. I defer discussion of what economic system best suits the world of the future. Yet how to ameliorate the distress of West Virginians who are prey to the critical changes necessitated by climate change? It must be done, but how? Certainly not by burning more coal. A modern dilemma. It is akin to the difficult but real situation in places producing oil or gas.
There is both a short run and a long run. In the short run we can expect that:
- Republicans will rally around Trump because their political careers are more important to them than the fate of the Earth.
- Republicans really do believe that tax cuts for the rich will create jobs. Of course, they also think it will fatten their wallets.
- Democrats will want to curry favor from Trump.
- Putin will curry favor from Trump.
- Russia will be emboldened, and will indulge in military adventures.
In the long run, we can consider that election of Trump is, among other things, a cry of despair from whites, rich and poor, even though they do not understand that they despair because world demographics has already relegated them to minority status, and so-called minorities (so-called by whites, in their arrogance), those of brown, red, yellow and black skin already outnumber whites. Although not yet true in the United States, the day is rapidly approaching.
This post, although not published until November of 2017 was actually written in December of 2016. I’m publishing it anyway as a benchmark of sorts to begin my experience of the era of Donald Trump.
Donald Trump has announced that he will take a pass on the Republican Debate tomorrow night, perhaps even staging a debate independently in the same timeframe. Ostensibly this is because he feels he cannot be treated fairly by Fox News. Anchorwoman Megyn Kelly said on the air words to the effect that … the media cannot be controlled … presumably to show how independent Fox News really is.
Absurdly, and sadly, exactly the opposite is true. The media, mainstream and otherwise, chase ratings, and Fox News and all other major cable news media are controlled these days by Trump. There is no way that these media can bring themselves to cover anything other than Trump’s latest nonsense until they feel they have exhausted whatever Trump is saying currently. The media have given over more air time to Trump than to all other presidential candidates combined. Is this their idea of media control? Alas, they cover Trump because that is what everyone else is doing.
The least important goal for the media, especially cable media, is transmit news. If in their quest for ratings, consequently maximizing revenues, they should happen to give out some useful information, well, so be it. In any event, it will be difficult to discern such information, awash as the screen, the airtime, is with commercials. The same damn commercials over and over. A reasonable person can either scream or turn the machine off. The so-called news media are not, they are profit generating vehicles. They apparently believe that the best current way to said profit is to fawn over Trump. It’s truly pathetic. Such is the stranglehold the corporate world holds over the American “culture.”
Today, March 31, 2014, the IPCC released its latest report about climate change. As I was making my bed, I chanced to have the Weather Channel playing on my television. The “meteorologist” was interviewing a scientist who was part of the IPCC and was offering his take on what the report reported. He went through the findings of the report about Climate Change, and was about to speak about what could be done about it. The “meteorologist” interrupted him in mid-sentence, and cut him off. This pressing need to interrupt was so that a commercial about a palliative for heartburn, then something to end your constipation could be shown. Commerce, always. The greed and hubris of capitalism writ large. Profit is far more important than the end of the world as we know it.
We hear talk unendingly about “National Security” but I for one have never heard a coherent definition of just what is meant by the term. No definition, that is, beyond the entirely fatuous and unbelievably vague assertion that it is whatever those in power want it to be. Anything that is counter to the will and the wishes of those who hold us in thrall is to them a threat to National Security. But that is no definition at all. Were the idea of National Security ever to be given cogent expression, those who pretend to be our leaders would lose the arbitrary power to control us at will.
The National Security is a chimera used as a way of cowing the citizenry. No one can actually give the term meaningful expression. Most frequently it is used to keep secret the myriad ways in which the government and its minions are gradually pressing ordinary citizens further and further under their proverbial thumb. How can ordinary (that is, those not part of the National Security apparatus) ever call into question anything the apparatus may do without fear of retaliation by any of numberless means?
The whole idea of National Security, although conceivably reasonable in some situations, is purely and simply a means of control of the general population by the corporate and militarist state. The mechanisms by which what one might call πλούσιος πολλοί keep the rest of us, οι πολλοί subservient are several. (Don’t call me out on the Greek, I’m just amusing myself with these terms.) The oldest is simply through the Constitution, reverence for which is truly religious. The government of the United States was never intended to work to the advantage of most of the population. Originally only rich landed white men were intended. Nominally this has been modified to include others, but the rights of these others are severely circumscribed. The hallowed system of checks and balances actually serves to keep progress and change at bay. Latterly the rise of the corporate state has helped to fill in the gaps wherein Constitutional remedies actually functioned. Finally, a new branch of government, what Tom Englehardt calls the National Security State, has arisen seemingly from nothing to become the most powerful of all. The NSS comprises the NSA and the military, with the collusion of Congress, the Judiciary, and POTUS, as an entity answering to no one but themselves. I refer the reader to the writings of Daniel Lazare, Chris Hedges, and Tom Englehardt for fuller exposition of these phenomena.
Whatever, the fact remains that no one can clearly define what National Security actually is, except to say that it has become the only thing that counts. Through it are justified war, torture, murder, assassination, slavery, both economic and physical, dissolution of human rights and much more, not the least of which is transfer of wealth from poor schmucks like us to the usurpers.
We hear talk unendingly about “National Security” but I for one have never heard a coherent definition of just what is meant by the term. No definition, that is, beyond the entirely fatuous and unbelievably vague assertion that it is whatever those in power want it to be. Anything that is counter to the will and the wishes of those who hold us in thrall is to them a threat to National Security. But that is no definition at all. Were the idea of National Security ever to be given cogent expression, those who pretend to be our leaders would lose the arbitrary power to control us at will.
The National Security is a chimera used as a way of cowing the citizenry. No one can actually give the term meaningful expression. Most frequently it is used to keep secret the myriad ways in which the government and its minions are gradually pressing ordinary citizens further and further under their proverbial thumb. How can ordinary (that is, those not part of the National Security apparatus) ever call into question anything the apparatus may do without fear of retaliation by any of numberless means?
The whole idea of National Security, although conceivably reasonable in some situations, is purely and simply a means of control of the general population by the corporate and militarist state. The mechanisms by which what one might call πλούσιος πολλοί keep the rest of us, οι πολλοί subservient are several. (Don’t call me out on the Greek, I’m just amusing myself with these terms.) The oldest is simply through the Constitution, reverence for which is truly religious. The government of the United States was never intended to work to the advantage of most of the population. Originally only rich landed white men were intended. Nominally this has been modified to include others, but the rights of these others are severely circumscribed. The hallowed system of checks and balances actually serves to keep progress and change at bay. Latterly the rise of the corporate state has helped to fill in the gaps wherein Constitutional remedies actually functioned. Finally, a new branch of government, what Tom Englehardt calls the National Security State, has arisen seemingly from nothing to become the most powerful of all. The NSS comprises the NSA and the military, with the collusion of Congress, the Judiciary, and POTUS, as an entity answering to no one but themselves. I refer the reader to the writings of Daniel Lazare, Chris Hedges, and Tom Englehardt for fuller exposition of these phenomena. References will be added in a day or two, but I’m under the weather today.
Whatever, the fact remains that no one can clearly define what National Security actually is, except to say that it has become the only thing that counts. Through it are justified war, torture, murder, assassination, slavery, both economic and physical, dissolution of human rights and much more, not the least of which is transfer of wealth from poor schmucks like us to the usurpers.
N.B.: This post is perhaps no longer as topical as it was a month ago, but I stand by the sentiments.
Truthdig announced as “Truthdigger of the Week” for September 1, 2013 all those who remain skeptical about the claims by the Obama administration regarding the use of sarin gas by the Syrian military against civilians and others. Truthdig regards this skepticism as useful and positive not because they know Syria did not carry out such an attack, but rather because the evidence proferred by the administration was not sufficiently solid to warrant a bombing attack by U.S. forces against targets held by the Assad government.
As it turns out, such a bombing was avoided due to numerous factors not needing explanation in the context of what is bothering me. All the “debate” in the media and elsewhere has been about the veracity of the allegations, and the consequences, good or bad, were the bombing to take place. My concern lies elsewhere.
Truthdigger? Well, yes. I’m now an old man, but not yet doddering. I remember the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” when I told anyone who would listen how phony the propaganda played. I told anyone who would listen that Nixon had no intention at all of ending the genocide in VietNam. And on and on. In ’91 I told anyone who would listen that the Gulf War would be a dark day indeed in human history. Again in ’02 and ’03 on the streets of Washington and New York telling anyone who would listen that Bush’s rush to war was entirely fake, a bundle of lies. When Obama was elected I so desperately wanted to believe the lies he told, but again, I told anyone who would listen that now-President Obama was not about to give up any of the imperial powers collected by Bush. And that’s the short list. The track record of the U.S. government is not enviable, to say the least.
When I was in graduate school at Michigan in the early sixties I took a microbiology course from a professor who admonished his students to always be skeptical about any new information received. I took it to heart. But for present purposes let me grant for argument’s sake that Assad really did do the dirty deed. Is the U.S. entitled to drop bombs in such circumstances?
I am not a pacifist, although I sometimes feel I should be. As for the mess in Syria, or any other move to violence, I hold that the U.S. government, in whatever form you envision it, will be entitled even to consider such action only when it apologizes for the genocide of two million in VietNam, when it apologizes for the entirely covert current move into Honduras, when it apologizes for the genocide of Native Americans, when it apologizes for the deliberate use of terrorism in the incendiary bombings of Dresden, Hamburg, Berlin, Tokyo, and countless other German and Japanese cities in the “Good War,” when it apologizes for being the only government in human history to deliberately use nuclear weapons, both on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and later in the deployment of depleted uranium, when it apologizes for carpet bombing of the helpless of Afghanistan and Iraq, when it apologizes for the countless ways it relentlessly oppresses the citizens of the world through its overt and covert military and spy apparatuses. And that’s just the short list.
In the many comments to the Truthdig article, only a few, a blessed few, refer disapprovingly to the long history of oppression and genocide by U.S. power. God bless those few. Pick your own god.
Violence, love of violence and the attendant power, is an addiction. So also is sin, however one may define this loaded term, in general. Sri Ramakrishna, the great nineteenth century Indian mystic, wrote in his “Gospel,” “A bath in the Ganges undoubtedly absolves one of all sins; but what does that avail? They say that the sins perch on the trees along the banks of the Ganges. No sooner does the man come back from the holy waters than the old sins jump on his shoulders from the trees. The same old sins take possession of him again. He is hardly out of the water before they fall upon him.”
Just so for mankind. We fall into sin or its secular equivalent, and willingly. We become what we profess to revile, despite the warnings of Kurt Vonnegut. And we kill. We are killing now. And it is done in the name of mercy, in the name of righteousness, in the name of peace.
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